


my grandpa's leather jacket and goggles

by Rebellion042



Series: we're gonna rattle this ghost town [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Kes Dameron & Poe Dameron - Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 09:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6369331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rebellion042/pseuds/Rebellion042
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't ever occur to Poe just how <em>there</em> the jacket always was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my grandpa's leather jacket and goggles

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell I've been listening to [Walk the Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL6bYdQwbEI) lately? 
> 
> Also, for some reason, the Kes & Poe tag wasn't in the Archive tags. At all. Grrr...
> 
> Thanks to my beta [Rominey](http://romnomn0m.tumblr.com/), as always! Love you!

Poe is six when he flies for the first time.

Maybe he should be scared, now that Yavin IV is below him and the distant stars cradle the tiny A-wing. But he can’t bring himself to feel any danger, not when his mother’s kind hands are on the controls under his, and he sits snugly in her lap.

“Mama, look!” He says, pointing to the sun. “It’s so close!”

His mother laughs and replies, “Any closer and we’d be toast. Careful, _mijo_.”

Of course, she’s kidding, but Poe steers them closer to home anyway.

 

*

 

Poe is seven when his parents lead him into the garage and pull the tarp off of a dilapidated A-wing and tell him it’s his.

“You’ll have to fix it up,” says his father. “But we think you can do it.”

His mother crouches and puts her hands on his shoulders. “This was your first ship, remember?”

Poe smiles; he does. “Yeah.”

He turns around and hugs his mom tightly, pulling on his father’s arm to bring him into the hug.

“Thanks,” he says.

 

*

 

Poe is eight when his mother dies.

He’s one replacement away from fixing the A-wing, and today he was going to show her how well it flew.

Instead, he’d padded into the kitchen to see the stricken face of his father.

When Poe looks back, he can’t remember when his dad told him. Everything afterwards, though, feels like an aftershock of an earthquake.

Shara Bey’s ashes are scattered in the sea close to the ranch, and Poe holds his father’s hand and cries.

He lies on her side of the bed when they get back to the house, face-down in her pillow.

It carries only a faint remnant of her—a trace of cinnamon and worn leather—but in no way compares to having her with him.

Before he leaves, he takes her jacket off of the nightstand and drapes it around himself.

The jacket _does_ trick him into thinking, for half a second, that his mother is alive—that any minute, she’ll come through the door, windswept from the latest mission as a “favor” to the General. She’ll kiss his dad and then Poe, and then she’ll help him with the A-wing and ask about his day—

Poe stops imagining, and reality _hurts_. It punches him in the gut and leaves him breathless from crying.

Kes finds his son sitting in the hallway, sobbing silently, and doesn’t say anything.

He sits next to Poe and wraps an arm around the leather-clad shoulders, crying silent tears of his own.

 

*

 

Poe is eleven when he moves on.

They don’t forget Shara—how could anyone? But the sharp pang when he looks at the A-wing, the tears that threaten when he sits by the tree in the front yard, the paralyzing ache he feels every time they receive another condolence message from a comrade; they fade away.

He shrugs on the jacket one day before going out and realizes it doesn’t hurt anymore.

That day, he flies his A-wing for the first time.

_Mom would be proud,_ he thinks.

 

*

 

When he’s thirty-two, he gives the jacket away.

“You know, this was my mom’s,” he says one day, tugging on the collar. He and Finn are in the tree in his front yard on Yavin, Finn having convinced him to climb to one of the wider branches.

Finn looks down at the jacket. “Really?”

“Yeah. Before that, it was her dad’s.”

“Wow. Talk about a history,” Finn replies, eyes widening. “Are you sure you want me to keep it?”

Poe smiles. “Yeah. It’s in good hands.”

“You would know,” Finn jokes lamely, but Poe kisses him anyway.

When he pulls away, he says, “For the record? My mom would have loved you.”

He swears he can feel her smiling.

  



End file.
